WhatsApp today officially launched its new WhatsApp Business app in select markets, including Indonesia, Italy, Mexico, the U.K. and the U.S., ahead of its planned worldwide rollout. The addition of business profiles and new messaging tools aimed at business customers is part of the company’s broader plan to generate revenue by charging larger enterprises for advanced tools to communicate with customers on the platform now used by over a billion people worldwide.

When it comes to artificial intelligence (AI) and Chinese tech companies, thoughts often begin and end with Baidu. But Tencent, Asia’s second highest-valued tech company behind Alibaba, has reminded the world that it too is investing in the field.

From the company’s point of view, adding bots to the customer service experience expands capacity, cuts wait times, and increases customer satisfaction — helping businesses measure up to the elevated expectations of today’s retail customer.

From the agent’s point of view, repetitive and simplistic tasks are off the table, which gives them time to focus on the more challenging issues that a human agent is far better suited to solving.

And from a customer’s point of view, incorporating bots into the service experience means instant responses to simple queries and more dedication from human agents when there are more complex issues to resolve. Ultimately — and most importantly — that means a higher level of service.

It seems like publications and business owners everywhere are talking about the rise of chatbots. Businesses are supposed to deploy chatbots, consumer gadgets are implementing intelligent systems, and some even say our jobs will be displaced by bots in the future. Whether driven by humans or bots, many of our interactions with contact centers today and in the future will shift from phone calls to online rich-text chat sessions. The real question is, where will these conversations take place?

Sometimes referred to as conversational commerce, chatvertising is a technique many experts in the marketing realm think is the latest worthwhile way to advertise products, services or brands to consumers. Put simply, it involves using chatbots to reach out to the target audience. Then, individuals can interact with brands through chatbots.

Kodak watched their stock price soar 60% after announcing an intention to launch KodakCoin, a cryptic cryptocurrency for photographers. Meanwhile, Facebook shuttered its Virtual Assistant, M, causing Wired.com to proclaim the death of chatbots. Facebook also shut down a similar initiative in July last year after false claims went viral that their bots created their own language.

Serverless platforms are now a commodity, you can have it in any popular Cloud provider and even from start ups. And nowadays are heavily used in professional environments. And we are just starting to see the use case in chatbots. Because the guts of a chatbot are made of APIs, seems pretty obvious that serverless can help us to design a microarchitecture inspired architecture. Different from a monolithic solution, this is message oriented, and in the end we pay only for the message processed from the messaging where our bot lives.

Microsoft today is unveiling new artificial intelligence technology that’s something of an artist – a “drawing bot.” The bot is capable of creating images from text descriptions of an object, but it also adds details to those images that weren’t included the text, indicating that the AI has a little imagination of its own, says Microsoft.